Taming Emacs

Emacs icon

I have always heard and read a lot about that piece of software called Emacs. You know what they say: you either love it or hate it (or else you pass by without knowing about it, in which case you probably don’t want to keep reading).

Maybe it’s time to seriously consider it, because it’s intriguing how its fans always say it is the climax of productivity in computer programming and several other tasks, although it may be really hard to grasp in the first place. I have been warned, and I am determined not to be easily scared off of it, no matter how daunting this task may be.

And as I like to use my blog as a back reference for things I achieve or come to learn after a great deal of work and research, it might be reasonable to expect me to blog about my progress or my rage while trying to tame this wonderful and powerful beast.

I have found great websites so far to start banging my head, namely the Emacs wiki, the Emacs blog and Google That is, of course, besides Emacs’ own website, which serves as a starting point for a lot of information.

So far I have managed to customize it a bit much to my liking, but mostly out of copying and pasting (or is it yanking?) snippets of code from the web into my .emacs file. It’s going to be a long journey until I start typing my own elisp code. I am not even scratching the surface yet, I’m barely staring at it.